Roadmap

Editor rewrite update

Related products: Card Creation

Hello everyone,

 

It’s been a while since we checked in with a progress update on the ongoing Editor Rewrite project, which will provide a much better foundation for future development. I’ve recently taken over Product Management duties for the editor, and I wanted to share an update here. 

 

The short form of this update is that we hear you, we want to get this right, and to make sure we do, our engineers are hard at work behind the scenes. 

 

The longer story is that there’s a lot of effort that goes into adapting an open source editor to our specific setup and in all the places where people access Guru information (the web app, Slack, Teams, mobile…). Plus we need to ensure that editing existing content works well with the new editor once it's released. 

 

After a thorough technical investigation we concluded that to do this successfully, we needed to start fresh rather than build on an increasingly shaky foundation. We've been hard at work on just that for the last few quarters--building an editor that will be easier to use and able to support the functionality you've all requested and we agree is critical to your success. Guru’s next editor will reduce friction, eliminate pesky bugs (for example: better accessibility, better copy and pasting, and more consistency between browsers), and lay the groundwork for many of the features you’ve been requesting. The editor rewrite is hotly anticipated by Guru users within Guru, too–we’re excited for improvements to content creation that will make our lives easier!

 

We know that this has taken much longer than the timeline we shared initially. In order to speed progress over the last few months, we've made significant changes that included overhauling our development process, hiring new engineers, and bringing in the right subject matter experts. We're seeing very positive results from these changes and are confident that we are on the right track. 

 

While we're not quite ready to offer a firm timeline for when the rewritten editor will be released, we are getting close to the point where we will be able to share that. We're doing everything we can to move that timeline forward--it's one of our highest priorities. As we complete a few crucial parts of this project over the next few weeks, we'll be able to offer a more definitive update. Be on the lookout for an update to this post from either Kate (Product Marketing Manager for this area of Guru) or myself in early September. 

 

Thank you so much for your patience during this effort! We are looking forward to completing this work and moving on to the updates you're all looking for 🚀

Thanks for sharing that background and updates with us! That’s really helpful to know. Looking forward to the new and improved version 🙌

Hi everyone, 

It’s been a month so we wanted to provide an update on how things are going since we mentioned last month that there were some big milestones we were looking towards. 

We’re very happy to report that things are progressing even better than we’d hoped. Last week we began our first round of internal testing in a sandbox environment with Guru employees from outside of the Product Development org. This is a huge milestone as we couldn’t move to this stage until things were working well enough that an author could use the new editor to create and manage the same kinds of content they create and manage with the existing editor. It also had to work well with our integrations, like Slack, and copying and pasting across various other apps. Our aim is to repeat this process of sandbox testing with several customers beginning some time in October while we continue to ensure seamless support across the millions of cards contained in all of your accounts. Based on how that goes, we’ll move on to enabling the new editor in existing Guru environments for a small set of customers (starting with ourselves), and then enabling it for everyone. 

While our final release date doesn’t have a firm timeline just yet, our next steps are clear and we see the light at the end of the tunnel and are looking forward to getting this into your hands!  

Thank you for your patience!

Great news @Laura Desmond-Black! 🥳 Have you already selected the customers that will participate on the testing? Do certain criteria have to be met in order to participate if we’d be interested? 🙂 

@Lucia Delicova @Laura Desmond-Black I had the same question. Guru seems to have a large client base willing to beta test things 😇

@Lucia Delicova & @Elliot Shaw - I appreciate the enthusiasm, it’s great to have so many customers willing to give things a try early on and help us prepare for wide releases. Truly a dream for us Product Managers 😊 !

We’ve not started organizing how we’ll find the sandbox testing group or the group for testing in existing environments, nor if there will be any particular requirements for either group. I’ll make sure to come back here with any sign up options that we formalize ahead of these two phases so you can sign up if the TBD requirements meet your needs/feel acceptable. 

Hi there,

I know this has been asked a gazillion times, but is there an update on when the new editor will be released?

Thanks

Hi @Bullan, 

I’m going to take your question as a reminder to post a general update :-)

We’re moving as fast as we can towards enabling the new editor in our own company instance with a goal of doing that by the end of this month. We have and create a ton of Cards so this will be a big step towards ensuring the new editor is ready for day-to-day use by highly active teams. In addition to that major step, we’re in the last phases of work related to ensuring the compatibility of existing Cards (there a millions of them!) across all the apps in the Guru ecosystem. Our current goal is to complete the release of the new editor to all Guru teams by the end of January. We’re doing everything we can to stick to that timeline, and even make it sooner if possible. I’ll be back with another update in early December.

 

 

Any update coming soon?

Hi @Kjetil Kartevold, 

Thanks for the reminder :) 

We’re going to enable the new editor for our own instance the week of January 3rd. We had hoped to do this sooner, as you can tell from my prior comments; however, as we continued to release updates to other areas of Guru, there were impacts on the editor that we needed to address. We’re essentially ready to enable it for ourselves now, but since we’re rapidly approaching a significant PTO and holiday period, we’ve opted to wait until everyone is back from vacation before doing that. The good news is while that has gone slower than hoped, other work has gone quite well.

Soon after we enable it for our instance, we’ll enable it for teams signing up for trials with Guru. From there we’ll map out the general release to existing customers. This will likely occur in phases. We’re still targeting the end of January for completing this effort. 

Look out for another update in the new year! 

Fingers crossed this still rolls out by the end of the month. It’ll be a great to get everyone motivated and more active in our Guru instance this year! 🙌

Hi everyone, 

I’m pleased to confirm that we enabled the new editor for our own company Guru instance last week and so far things are going well. We’re finding bugs, which we expected, but nothing too serious (so far 🤞) and are continuing the work that will support a wider rollout. We still expect to enable the new editor for new teams signing up for trials later this week. I’ll be back with an update once we begin releasing the new editor to existing customers, which shouldn’t be too much longer. 

Thank you again so much for your patience throughout this project.

Is there any insight into what the new editor will do feature-wise?

Hi @David MacVicar,

The new editor is a foundational release and was not intended to include much new functionality. We went into the project expecting to resolve a number of outstanding bugs and UX problems, and that has gone as expected, several items have been resolved. While the intent of this wasn't to add a lot of new functionality, we were able to make some requested improvements. We'll be going through existing feedback posts this week and marking the ones that are solved by the new editor. I'll list the links to those here once that's done so it’s easy to see what they are.

The reason we invested in this foundational work is that we determined it was the best way to be able to solve long-standing major authoring requests, things like collaborative editing, shared drafts, and inline comments. We've already kicked off investigation for some of that work so we'll have more to share about those once the new editor release is complete. 

I hope that helps!

Hi @David MacVicar,

The new editor is a foundational release and was not intended to include much new functionality. We went into the project expecting to resolve a number of outstanding bugs and UX problems, and that has gone as expected, several items have been resolved. While the intent of this wasn't to add a lot of new functionality, we were able to make some requested improvements. We'll be going through existing feedback posts this week and marking the ones that are solved by the new editor. I'll list the links to those here once that's done so it’s easy to see what they are.

The reason we invested in this foundational work is that we determined it was the best way to be able to solve long-standing major authoring requests, things like collaborative editing, shared drafts, and inline comments. We've already kicked off investigation for some of that work so we'll have more to share about those once the new editor release is complete. 

I hope that helps!

Awesome - the Guru team rocks. Looking forward to the editor release!

Hello again!

These are the existing feedback posts that will be addressed with the new editor release: 

 

 

 

 

 

There are also other improvements that don’t have corresponding feedback posts, things like a smoother experience for those using IME keyboards and editing tables, faster loading times for Cards with many links, and more. 

Additionally, once the new editor release is complete, we’ll be able to quickly address another feedback item (that we’ve missed having in place too!):
 

 

Thanks!

Hello! It’s time for an update!

We’ve taken another step forward: starting on January 18th, all new trials of Guru are using the new editor. The next step is enabling the new editor for existing customers, which we plan to do in batches according to how well customer content performs in our automated conversion testing. We expect to start this process slowly in early February and then increase the pace and batch size as we see how things go. Because we want to take a thorough approach to this process, that means we won’t complete this release to all customers by the end of this month. We’ll continue to provide updates here as the release process progresses. If you’re curious for more details about what to expect once the new editor is enabled for your instance, check out our new Help Center article about the update. 

Hello, is there a target date for supporting collaborative editing?
Thank you, really looking forward to this feature. 

Hi @Vera Green, I’ll update the other post you commented on as that’s the better place to find out about our collaborative editing plans. While the new editor is a foundational piece to that work, it doesn’t include collaborative editing functionality. Thanks!

Hello again!

February is about to disappear, so it’s time for an update 😄. Early this month we began releasing the new editor to teams that existed before January 18th (the date on which all new teams started getting the new editor by default). With yesterday’s batch of teams, we’re now about 10% of the way through releasing the editor to existing teams. We’re now converting a few batches of teams a week, so this percentage will grow quickly. I’ll provide updates here so you can follow along with our progress. You’ll know your team has the new editor because a small pop up will appear letting you know you’re working with the new editor the first time you create or update a card after conversion. 

I know many of you are anxious to be on the new editor as soon as possible. At this time we’re still making decisions about which teams to convert based on how content performs in our conversion testing as we continue making small adjustments to that area. So far things are going well and we’re pleased with progress. As always, please let us know if you have questions!

Hi everyone,

I'm happy to share that more than 50% of existing teams have been migrated to the new editor--we're making great progress and expect to be able to complete this process in the next few weeks. I'll continue to share progress as we get closer to being at 100%. We're jazzed that we'll soon be able to fully focus on our next major effort in the authoring space: collaborative editing. Thanks!

Hi @Laura Desmond-Black! Congrats on rolling this out!

Given what a long slog it’s been to set the foundation, I’m sure your team would like to catch their breath, but I hope that you’ll be in a position to ship inline commenting (comments spiked to a specific point in a card) before boiling the whole ocean of collaborative editing!

In our organization, which is a GSuite shop, it’s just table stakes that I should not have to start my comment by quoting “Where you say the thing about CFR in sentence four, you really should spell this acronym out”, but that I should be able to highlight CFR and my comment can be “spell this out” We’d take advantage of this feature way before we’d need to see full support for live cursors of other editors in a card &c. 

As a fluent speaker of Product, I’m always happy to discuss further if needed. Sign me up!

-DR 

Hi @Dan Rinzel! Thank you, we are indeed thrilled to be this close to the completion of this project.

We agree that inline comments are critical for collaboration and we'll be updating the main post for that request very soon - the short version of the update is that we see inline comments as part of the collaborative editing umbrella that we're beginning to shift towards though it won’t be the first thing we tackle. I'll add more details in a reply to your other comment :)

Great to hear. Please feel free to add the new editor for our instance. It’s low risk for us as we never really adopted the platform in a serious way yet, mainly because of some major limitations we had with the editor and some other convenience aspects. I’m willing to take a second look with the team to see if these improvements can keep us in the platform before we decide to bail. Thank you.

-Derek 

Hi @DEREK ARSENAULT, we’re still making decisions about which teams to enable based on how their content does in conversion testing. The good news is your team’s content did well in our last round of testing so it was in the batch of teams that we moved to the new editor this morning. Please let us know if you have questions as you give it a try!

Hi @Laura Desmond-Black I hope you’re having a lovely day! Seeing your response to Derek, any chance you are able to check how’s our content doing and when (approx.) could we expect getting the new editor? We still have plenty of content to migrate from our other resources as well as continuous creation of new content, so having the new editor would be awesome :-) 

Terms & ConditionsCookie settings